SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue Two - Journal - Page 125
her syllables in red lip liner. Looks
like one of Shakespeare’s girls. And boy she rhymes
like he’s inside her—thumbing through her book.
Aesthetically snatched and bawdy as hell—this is form refashioned for fun. Watkins also
trades profusely in pantoums. One standout is “Florida Jesus,” a play on the trope of The
Florida Man from popular tabloids. Florida Jesus is “an old’ swamp chicken / walking on
water” who “ain’t afraid of no alligators” and
[l]ike a long-legged water skeeter,
Florida Jesus eats all the mosquito larvae in your soul.
Your heart’s water is fit for a glass bottom boat,
Florida Jesus has taken out all the farm chemicals
Florida Jesus eats all the mosquito larvae in your soul
like a mighty mullet.
Florida Jesus has taken out all the farm chemicals.
But Florida Jesus is also that hurricane bruising the Gulf.
Jesus is a little country, mighty powerful, but a force we ought not trifle with.
Not only does Watkins masterfully manage inherited forms, she also pays homage to
contemporary forms—and trans-poetic history—when she writes her own burning haibun,
a hybrid form that combines prose poetry, erasure, and the Japanese haiku, which torrin a.
greathouse, author of, most recently, DEED, originated. In the prose portion, Watkins writes
about Thomas(ine) Hall, a trans person from 1600s England, who “took a bread knife to
their hair and fought in the Anglo-French War” but became Thomasine after the war, only to
“[hear] of Plymouth Rock” years later and imagine “signing their name Thomas again.” In the
second section, as the poem erases itself, we are left with a starker image of a person “born /
into war” surrounded by “lily petals” and “bone lace,” who is under attack. And as the poem
concludes, the haiku leaves us with an even sparer image that tries to imagine a reprieve for
Thomas(ine):
Sing, armor like [] bone
lace, [] lily [] apparel. [] Cloth,
[] scream [] that [] we are [] safe.
To represent the erased language as small brackets creates a kind of haunting pause in these
final three lines of the poem. On the one hand, the image of bone armor could seem safe—a
shell, a carapace—but on the other, it could seem macabre, a kind of death shroud over
Thomas(ine). Indeed, the slowness of the next two lines as lilies, lace, and cloth juxtapose
screams of safety creates a mood of precarity. Watkins wants to imagine a place of safety,
literally pulls apart her own narrative to do so, but cannot free it from the specter of violence
she herself contends with in modern American life.
Though Watkins moves deftly through different forms, sometimes the poems feel
repetitive. In the final section for instance, Watkins incorporates an imagined interview
between The Public Universal Friend, a Quaker religious figure, and a reporter. The poem,
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